Across all key performance indicators (KPIs) measuring gender equality in business, there is little progress overall compared to the previous year. Men are still by far overrepresented at all management levels. Starting from near equality in non-management, women’s representation drops significantly with each level up, reaching 22% in top management.
The female talent pool remains underutilized. On the upside, the pipeline is slightly less leaky than the year before: promotions and hiring have increased by low single-digit percentage points.
Conscious efforts pay off! Advance members perform considerably better than non-members across all gender equality KPIs. The so-called Glass Ceiling is much thinner in Advance members, and their share of women is consistently higher at each management level.
Not much has changed in the (often rigid) corporate norms (e.g., in how we work, careers are molded and genders split when it comes to organizing professional and private lives). However, the labor market has seen dramatic changes in recent years, with labor shortage being one of the most important challenges. At the same time, employee needs have been changing (especially in younger generations), leading to an increasing mismatch between how we would like to live and work and how we actually do it.
With unemployment at a two-decade low, skills shortage at an unprecedented high and a seismic demographic shift as the baby boomers retire, Swiss companies need to radically rethink how they recruit, develop and retain talent. Therefore, this year’s report explores how equity win-wins and flexibility gains can enrich the talent pool for a thriving economy.
… we changed some of the outlived norms to equalize paid and unpaid work, if we found ways to leverage diverse talent, and we managed to gain efficiencies by moving from rigid to inclusive, flexible, and trust-based work models. These levers could literally unleash 100,000s of additional full-time equivalents.
This report offers Executives insights and tools to leverage the potential of gender equity for their business. Find out more including an overview of all key performance indicators and industry-specific data by clicking on “Full Report” below.
Skills shortage means that it is even more important to develop, engage, and promote all the (diverse) talents you already have. Regarding promotions and new hires, companies are still leaving women “stuck” in the talent pipeline.
What if your company fully used the female talent pipeline? Between non-management and lowest/lower management the percentage of women drops from 48% to 33%. In middle / top management, there are only 24% women. This drop means that at each level, about a third of the potential female talent is lost due to the leaky pipeline. Companies simply can’t afford this level of female talent loss, especially in times of skills shortage. Rather, companies need to leverage their entire talent pool.
Part-time and other forms of flex work – done right – can have demonstrable benefits to companies in times of skills shortage. But part-time work remains gendered and irreconcilable with holding a leadership role. And: Switzerland has one of the highest part-time gender gaps of any European country – twice as high as the OECD as a whole!
While the average working percentage for women in non-management functions is 84% (and 94% for men), in management, the average is close to or significantly over 90% in management for all genders (women work on average 90% in lowest/lower management and 95% in middle / top management). The average employment percentage for women with personnel responsibility is 93% (99% for men). This means: Many women with lower percentages are not even in contention – whether on purpose or not – for leadership positions. Case in point: Especially for women, full-time employees have considerably higher chances of getting promoted. Even though only 56% of women work full-time, 68% of all women promoted were full-time.
To level the playing field, changing antiquated work norms is crucial. This change includes organizational culture, type of leadership, and structures. Companies must trust employees to know what works best for them. This way, inefficiency is minimized and employee engagement maximized.
If paid work was equally distributed across men and women – and if men and women worked the same employment percentage – everyone in the GIR sample could work 89% without the Swiss labor market losing any FTEs. For GIR companies, this equals 37.5 hours of paid work a week, a standard full-time working week in Norway. Even if everyone worked just 90% instead of 89%, we would gain an additional 43,700 full-time equivalent employees in Switzerland. Companies can and must create the structures that allow for this to become reality.
The traditional Swiss career model assumes that key career steps are taken between 31 and 40. 44% of all promotions go to employees in that age group, even though the group only comprises 28% of the workforce. It is around age 35 that men gain a significant advantage over women when it comes to promotions and key career steps. At the same time, the average age of women at the birth of their first child is a little over 31 years (FSO, 2023a). This indicates that Swiss companies are clinging to a traditional career progression model.
It is exactly during this period that the gap between men and women’s employment percentages widens drastically: While men and women work at a very similar percentage between 21 and 30, the part-time gap in favor of men widens to 12 percentage points between 31 and 40 and 14 percentage points (!) between 41 and 50.
Conversations around careers implicitly focus on paid work, but what if we took unpaid work into account? After all, it is patently untrue that men work more than women. Factoring in paid AND unpaid labor, men and women work roughly the same number of hours a week, though women spend more time on care work that goes unpaid. This means, naturally, that many women cannot take on more paid work.
What would it mean for women’s careers if men did their fair share of unpaid care work? Women spend an average of 11.2 hours a week more on care work than men. If men in this year’s GIR sample would take on half of that burden, women would be free to do 5.6 hours more of paid work. In the average company with a work week of 42.1 hours, women could increase their average employment percentage from 85.7% to about 100%.
But what can companies, managers and individuals do to take these steps towards change? Let yourself be guided by our recommendations and become inspired by our best practice examples.